This copy is too darn wide!

Everything you write is under some kind of length constraint. For example, if this newsletter was 40,000 words long, it would be unlikely to hold your attention. Twitter doesn't let you write more than 280 characters per tweet. And so on, and so forth.

These constraints mean you need to make some tough decisions about what information you include and what you leave out. I like to think of this as deep copy vs wide copy.

You can go deep and use lots of words on just one or two main messages. Or you can go wide and have lots of main messages, with just a few of your words on each one.

Too much width, not enough depth

Most of the copy I see is wide copy. And in some circumstances, that's perfectly fine. A feature page for software, for example, should probably cover all of the features you offer, so people can quickly see if you have the things they need.

But I think that businesses often do themselves a disservice by writing wide copy when they could have written deep copy.

The result is an end product that is significantly less persuasive (and therefore less effective) than it could have been.

Hello, Hello Fresh

Here's an example of some wide copy that could have been deep. This is a direct mail letter I got from Hello Fresh. You’ll probably be familiar - they’re one of those companies that sends you recipes and ingredients to make your dinner every week.

Anyway, here's a snippet of the letter:

This is a classic example of the wide approach. They've broken their product down into three main benefits, with roughly the same amount of text under each one:

• Food with purpose (fresh produce, or something)

• Get back quality time (self-explanatory)

• Easy, delicious extras! (ability to get four meals instead of three, which is nice I guess)

Now, I could be wrong about this, but I think that the real value of a Hello Fresh delivery is in the second benefit: time savings.

Hello Fresh is a huge time saver! You don't have to shop, plan meals or even think about what you're going to eat. That's not just a time saving, that's an energy saving as well, because planning a week of meals on a Sunday when you're tired is fairly punishing.

In comparison, the other two benefits are nice-to-have at best. They're okay, for sure. But they really don't compare to the benefits of not having to plan meals or go to the supermarket.

With that in mind, you could improve this bit of marketing material significantly by just scrapping the first and third benefits altogether. Then, you can use the space you've just freed up to really focus on the time saving benefit.

Now, the world (or at least the page) is your oyster.

Now you can really sell your reader by going deeper on just one benefit.

You can tell a bit of a story if you want, about what a customer's life looked like before Hello Fresh, and what it looks like now.

Or you can give some use cases to bring it to life. For example, "save time" is great. But "get more time in your evenings to enjoy the summer" is a lot better.

This approach just isn't possible if you're using up precious page space on additional, less-compelling benefits.

This isn't as risky as it looks

This can be scary. What if someone really cared about a benefit you decided not to mention? The reality is that this risk is much smaller than you think it is - in fact, it's so small that you can generally assume it doesn't exist at all.

Here's why:

Let's say that Hello Fresh took my advice and wrote a new letter that only focussed on time savings.

How many recipients of that letter are going to be people who don't care about time savings?

What's more, how many recipients are going to be people who don't care about time savings and also care very deeply about the fact that Hello Fresh deliver fresh produce?

For your new letter to not connect with someone who it otherwise would have connected with, both of these things have to be true.

I'm going to hazard a guess and say that the number of people who don't care about time savings, but do care about freshness, is 0.

The time savings are the killer feature; everything else is just noise. By focussing on that killer feature, Hello Fresh really wouldn't be taking much of a risk at all. Rather, they'd just be using their very limited space to sell the aspect of their product that really makes peoples' lives significantly better.

Let's not be too mean

Let's be clear though. This letter is perfectly fine. It reads well. It's scannable. It has a very compelling offer. Its offer is aware of its audience. I could go on, but you get the idea - it's a good letter.

But I don't think "good" is enough.

Writing content that is good rather than great makes you vulnerable. The minute a competitor comes along with great content, they're going to start picking customers off you, even if their product isn't as good.

So if you want to stop writing good content, and start writing great content, start looking at wide copy you're using and ask yourself if it can be turned into deep copy.

Find out by giving it ago. Distill your wide copy down to just one benefit. Build off of that, sell that story, and connect with your customers. You won't regret it.

Let me know how you go.

See you, bye